The invention relates generally to the field of photography, and in particular to electronic photography. More specifically, the invention relates to a digital camera that interfaces with a host computer.
Digital cameras, such as the Kodak Digital Science DC25(trademark) camera, allow images to be utilized on a home computer (PC) and to be incorporated into e-mail documents and personal home pages on the World Wide Web. Presently, images must be copied to the PC and transmitted as e-mail, for example using an online service or an Internet Service Provider (ISP), via a modem from the user""s PC. It would be desirable to be able to transmit pictures directly from the digital camera instead of first transferring the pictures to a PC. For instance, on a vacation trip, it is desirable to immediately share pictures with friends or relatives via e-mail or Internet access. It is also desirable to transmit pictures from a location without PC access in order to free up camera storage to take additional pictures. There are a wide variety of connection means to online services such as America On Line, ISPs, and bulletin board services. Each of these services typically requires an account name and password, as well as local telephone access numbers, and specific communications settings. It would be difficult to provide an easy-to-use means with buttons or menus on a small digital camera to input and/or modify all of these required settings.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above. Briefly summarized, according to one aspect of the present invention, a network configuration file is generated at a host computer and downloaded to a digital camera. This file contains instruction information for communicating with a selected destination via a communications interface. The digital camera includes a xe2x80x9csendxe2x80x9d button or LCD icon which allows the user to easily transmit one or more images via a wired or wireless communications interface to a desired destination, which among other possibilities may be an Internet Service Provider or a digital photofinishing center. When the user selects this option, the communications port settings, user account specifics, and destination connection commands are read from the network configuration file. Examples of these settings include serial port baud rate, parity, and stop bits, as well as account name and password.
In addition, information about which image or images to transmit is entered using the user buttons on the digital camera. This information is used to automatically establish a connection, log-in to the desired destination, and to transmit the image. The transmission may occur immediately after the pictures are taken, for example if the camera has a built-in cellular phone modem, or at a later time, when the camera is connected to a separate unit (such as a dock, kiosk, PC, etc.) equipped with a modem. In the latter case, a xe2x80x9cutilization filexe2x80x9d is created to provide information on which images should be transmitted to which account.
These and other aspects, objects, features and advantages of the present invention will be more clearly understood and appreciated from a review of the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments and appended claims, and by reference to the accompanying drawings.